Monday: January 7, 2013

The new wristbands will work in tandem with a new Disney app that you can use on your smartphone. The wristband (officially called MagicBand) can be used as your rooom key, theme park ticket, photopass, payment information and even access to FastPass for quicker access to rides and attractions. So long Key to the World cards!

Tuesday: December 18, 2012

The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.

Monday: November 14, 2011

What does the future hold for passenger air travel? National Geographic takes a look at some future technologies being developed right now. You just might be commuting at twice the speed of sound in a dart-like airplane and then arriving at the airport of the future. Do all airplanes of the future all have free in-flight wi-fi? That would be totally cool.

An interesting read for those of you who want to have a little more insight as to just what Amazon does these days on the Interwebs besides selling everything under the sun. There's an interesting chart about half-way down he page that discusses how some important companies rely on Amazon's web services to power their products. If AWS shut off today, well - it's best not to think about it.

Wednesday: November 9, 2011

It seems that Nintendo had originally planned to have only one controller / tablet accessible to the Wii U at launch time (the other controller would have been your standard Wii-mote variety). Someone at Nintendo must have realized that this would probably be a bad idea so they have been hard at work at trying to make two tablets work for the console. The console's processor and RAM constraints may have played a part in pairing a singular tablet. However, Nintendo may have solved this so multi-tablet gaming may be coming to a living room near you.

Monday: August 15, 2011

Google has taught us all that people are too busy to remember version numbers these days. It's better just to keep updating software and have to worry about pesky version number conventions. Mozilla thinks this is a good idea and has decided to adopt this release schedule for future non-version-numbered releases of Firefox. Good for them.

Wednesday: August 3, 2011

Andy Gavin has written a post with a behind the scenes video from HBO's Game of Thrones depicting how most of the locations are built using modern CGI and clever scouting. If you've watched the show (and I highly recommend that you do) some of the per-CGI moments in the video may actually take you by surprise, once you see their post-CGI counterparts.

Friday: July 29, 2011

Apple's last earnings report (PDF here) showed that the company had $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June. In other words, the world's largest tech company has more cash than the world's largest sovereign government. That's because Apple collects more money than it spends, while the U.S. government does not.

Thursday: July 28, 2011

Ouch, with news this bad it can only mean one thing... price drop! If you are so bold to purchase one of these boxes you'll only be paying $99 bucks as opposed to the $249 you would have originally had to spend. You'll learn to love the clunky interface and all it's complicated intricacies, that is unless your cable company hasn't blocked you from using it. Good luck!

Tuesday: July 26, 2011

Moore also cites the dramatic increase in content as a major reason for the expanded viewership. Forty-eight hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute, adding up to nearly 8 years of content daily. And YouTube isn’t just for the young crowd. Even though YouTube lists its demographic as 18-54 years old, Pew found that nearly one-third of online Americans age 65 and older uses video sharing sites. Parents are also 20 percentage points more likely to have used a video sharing site than non-parents.

Monday: July 25, 2011

TechCrunch, as well as many others, found out that Facebook was hiding a secret app (not really secret, universal apps contain both sets of code for iPhone and iPad bundled together - although jailbreaking is required to figure that one out) in their latest iPhone app update. That 'secret' turned out to be the official Facebook app for iPhone. TechCrunch has a whole slew of screenshots that you can take a look at as to properly get yourself prepared the social media onslaught.

Friday: July 15, 2011

The rampant use of hotel guests taking advantage of their refill privelages have finally put Disney over the edge. DIS Unplugged reports that they are currently testing new mugs that have embedded RFID chips in them. If you've exhausted your free refill privelages for that day, no soda dispensed for you. Take that, thrifty guests!

Tuesday: July 12, 2011

It seems to be a week of redesigns around the Interwebs. The source link will take you on over to TechCrunch which has a brand new look. The actual content of the article will tell you about Pandora's upcoming redesign, which will also has a brand new look. The new site bring everything you love about Pandora minus the use of Flash in favor of HTML5. And according to TechCrunch, it's beautiful.

Monday: May 17, 2010

Factors that contribute to a good shopping experience, according to the survey, include having customer-centric store design, maintaining shopper history data, creating ambiance, and carrying and displaying a well-organized, 'rationalized' product assortment.

Monday: April 12, 2010

So now the big question is just who will purchase Palm and for how much. According to the source article HTC, Lenovo ,and RIM have all expressed some kind of interest in being a potential future owner of the currently troubled handset maker.